Thursday, February 16, 2006

Legal term learned

From a story in the Rocky about a Saudi couple charged with kidnapping:

A judge today denied a Saudi woman's request to be tried separately from her husband on charges of kidnapping an Indonesian nanny and holding her against her
will in their Aurora home....

Both Al-Turki [the husband], who is free on $400,000 bond and Khonaizan [the wife], who is free on $150,000 bond, face additional federal charges of forced labor, document servitude and harboring an illegal immigrant. That trial is set for April 24.

The story's gotten quite a lot of attention, understandably, but I never read far enough to get to the term (and the charge of) "documentary servitude." According to the Human Rights Center of the University of California at (yay!) Berkeley, documentary servitude is "withholding or destroying documents as part of [a human-] trafficking scheme." Documents like green cards or passports or whatever furriners are supposed to carry, one supposes.

Doesn't one? In any case it's gonna take some work to use the term five times in a sentence (in a sentence five times? five times in five different sentences?), ain't it?

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